The Hockey Mom: Tryouts turn team players into individuals

There may be no “I” in “team,” but there
sure is one in “evaluation.” This reality hit me while
we were watching my son, Sam, at tryouts recently.

April Bowling is a mother of two,
including one avid little hockey player named Sam. Owner of TriLife
Coaching, a multisport training firm in Essex, Mass., April also
co-founded the TriROK Foundation.

I use the term “tryout” loosely, because in our
league, there is an order to Mites that goes something like Mite I
(learn-to-skate), Mite I Travel (you learned to skate last year,
but not all that well), Mite 2 (now you only fall down 20 percent
of the times you try to stop), and Mite 1 (you are either a phenom
or you are aging out to Squirts next year and there aren’t
enough phenoms to fill the team).

Thanks to his parents’ cluelessness, Sam started his
hockey career in December 2010, halfway through the season. See, we
thought you played hockey in winter. So I started investigating
options in November, and found out that the season already was two
months deep. Oops.

Sam was game, though, and jumped in at age 5 to Mite I. He loved
it. He also was a terrible skater. Not as awful as when he’d
briefly tried the sport at age 4 and completely rejected it, but
pretty close. Sam is a really big kid and does not have an outsized
sense of balance to match. But he learns quickly, he’s smart
and understands the game, and he is the ultimate team player so he
passes at most of the right moments and enjoys the defensive end of
hockey. So it worked out.

At the beginning of last season, he was briefly put in Mite 2.
It was an honest mistake … his skating had improved a lot,
and he looked a lot more like an 8-year-old than a 6-year-old. It
took one game for all of us to agree that he (and the teams) would
be way better off if he moved back to Mite I, so he went to the
travel team. He handled it with aplomb and had a great season,
really finding a niche with teammates he loved. Working closely
with their coaches, they developed a team talent greater than the
sum of their individual skills, with most players learning the
value of position, timing and teamwork above and beyond the
individual desire to score. As a result, they advanced to the
championship game.

During that process, most of the kids on his team became
integral not because of their skating and puck handling, but
because they brought lesser-recognized talents that contributed to
the team overall. A nose for the puck. The tenacity to dig it out
of corners. A willingness to pass. Communication skills that helped
development.

In other words, things that were not necessarily going to emerge
during tryout drills, and it was clear how acutely some of the kids
felt the difference in emphasis from team to individual at
tryouts.

Sam held his own through all the drills, but at the end, he and
another teammate got separated from the rest of their team and sent
to scrimmage with some Mite I players. Ostensibly it was just to
even the numbers, but to the two of them it was clear that they
were going to be separated from their teammates forever. Talking to
them after, neither one was worried that they were being demoted,
only that they were being separated from their team. If
they’d been sent up to Mite 1, they would have been upset.
The point was in being with the team they’d developed, not in
showcasing the skills they’d developed.

It was painful to see but also interesting to watch. I’m a
triathlete. We don’t have teams unless it’s the
Olympics. And even then it’s a team in name only. But Sam and
his teammate wanted nothing more than to be with their
comrades-in-arms, regardless of their standing.

Hockey is such a fluid, beautiful discipline. It has more
strategy than basketball, without the constraining structure of
football. Stars are less important than depth in hockey, so even
many talented players remain attuned to the concept of hard work
and teamwork. That combination has made me a huge fan of a game I
didn’t grow up with, so it was strange to watch the ultimate
team sport become so individual, if only for one day a year.

Sam left tryouts unhappy, despite giving his all. He’d
been separated from his team and that felt wrong. His teammate had
it just as bad … choking back tears in the changing room
because there might not be the chance to stay with a talented older
brother despite hard work and the reality that — at 5 years
old — this child was an incredible skater and player for such
a young age.

I initially was upset for both of them even though I was
confident they’d both wind up on the right team for their
level. The process just didn’t seem fair quite fair. But
after just a few days, Sam already had come to terms with whatever
tryouts brought. Talking to my husband about possibly being left
back while most of his friends moved forward, he was decisive.
“I can make new friends, Dad,” he said. “All that
matters is that I’m on a team.”

Sam isn’t going to the NHL. He isn’t getting a
scholarship to Boston College. He just loves to play. Maybe the
best thing it teaches him is that life isn’t fair, but you go
out and give it your all anyway. You learn that practice counts as
much as games. And while you can’t always stick with your
buddies, you can always stick to your guns and play as hard as you
can.

As my friend said to me after watching Sam struggle with the
experience, “You can’t always prepare the path for your
child, but you can prepare your child for the path.”

Good advice for hockey; good advice for life.

This article originally appeared in the June 2012 issue of
New England Hockey Journal.